[generic_user]

An animated scene is broken down into frames. In each frame there is usually geometry that is moving. Each piece of geometry is a collection of polygonal data that has (xyz) points as its basic primitive.

It is often convenient, sometimes necessary to store point data into an off-line file for each frame of the animation. That point data is called a bake.or a point cache.

For instance if you do a simulation that takes 4 hours to solve you would absolutely want to bake out each frame of the point geometry. Then you can load that data into ram and play back the simulation inside of a modeling/animation program in real time.

There are many other uses for geometry baking.